


Playground

by PumpkinPantaloons



Category: The Evil Within (Video Game)
Genre: Again, Gen, Joseph got shot, Stream of Consciousness, because he's unlucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 23:55:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3307934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PumpkinPantaloons/pseuds/PumpkinPantaloons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joseph clawed at the part of him that was telling him to lie back down, sleep, let it all go, and tore it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Playground

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry I don't know what I'm doing

At first Joseph was trying to figure out why he was on the ground  
Then he was trying to figure out where the pain was coming from  
Then he heard the gunshot

And then he remembered. Kidman had shot him. On purpose or not didn’t seem to matter at the moment; just that he was ruining his vest. And his tie. And his shirt. There was blood everywhere. But, wait, he’d already ruined them, because this was the second time he’d been shot.

Over seven years on the force and when he finally gets shot, it’s twice in one day. In a hell full of monsters. Actually it was less incredulous when put that way, because he’d also been attacked by a giant mutant dog, almost blown to smithereens by various traps, and thrown off a flying bus; and all of those he’d implausibly survived. Getting shot twice was positively mundane by comparison. But still somehow hurt the most.

Then Joseph jolted. Did Kidman shoot Sebastian too? Or just run after Leslie? He recalled seeing her stilettoes come into view, pause, and then click quickly out of his peripheral vision while he lie limply on the cool, rubbery tiles of the playground. He rolled his head to look upwards, but couldn’t see anything beyond a cloudy sky, so he pressed his right hand over the bullet wound in his chest, grunting as he pushed himself into a sitting position.

He was staring at a gaping, crumbling hole in a jagged crescent shape where Sebastian had been. If it wasn’t this strange dream world, because that was what it was, a bad bad dream (he had to believe), he would assume Sebastian was dead from the drop alone, but falling seemed to be the one thing that didn’t kill anyone here.

Wasn’t Kidman proof enough? Weren’t they all?

Joseph took short, watery breaths as he inched forward so that he could look down into the hole, but only saw an impossibly black pit. Or maybe that was his vision.

Joseph remembered getting shot.

The brightly colored, silicone squares felt cool against his cheek as he realized he was lying down again. There was a soap bubble delicately hovering off the ground. Beyond it several more stayed suspended. There was also blood. It was slick on the gelatinous surface and probably wouldn’t dry easily. The puddle was spreading but he felt numb. Probably shock.

He wondered if the only reason why he hadn’t been eaten alive by the monsters yet was because the boy, Leslie, had made the park a safe place. The sky rumbled quietly, and while light still shown on him, beyond the small park rain started to pour down in a curtain that painted everything else grey and blue.

Joseph laughed, and then gasped out as the pain tore at his chest and jolted down his side. He reached out a hand, silently begging for assistance. Oh, right, everyone had left him behind; willingly or not. He pressed both shaking hands to the wound in his chest, curling in on himself as he groaned. He could see the monsters, with their bubbling skin and wicked grins, milling beyond the playground, seemingly blind to it.

_Give in_  
 _Give up_  
 _No more fear_  
 _No more fighting_  
 _No more wanting_  
 _No more hope_

He’d been becoming like them, but then Seb had stabbed him with something in the base of his neck. It had hurt, and he’d blacked out, and when he came to, his partner was gone again. He hadn’t had an episode after that, and the urge to just give in, to just give up, hadn’t returned the whole time he’d been alone, running and fighting and hiding and praying that Seb and Julie were fine. Hoping he would see them again.

He’d been so relieved when he’d run into Sebastian again at the bus. But then his heart had plunged into his stomach when his partner had admitted he’d had an episode himself. Joseph had thought he was too strong for that, and he’d wondered if Seb’s mind had been dwelling on Lily and Myra, and that that was where the hopelessness had come from. Joseph had wanted to say so many things in that moment, _I’m sorry!_ _Are you alright?_ _Is it my fault? Did I infect you?_ But he knew what giving in felt like, so he opted for distracting Seb with the bus instead.

Lying in his blood on the playground, he wasn’t sure he liked the bus idea anymore – but at least it had gotten his partner closer to the lighthouse, where he knew they needed to go. He just hoped Sebastian knew what needed to be done, because he sure as hell didn’t. His thoughts and his notebook were a jumbled mess, as the strange land they were in twisted and squirmed its way out of rational analysis, making it impossible for him to tell what the correct course of action was, let alone where he was at at any given moment.

Like right now. He should be dead already. Instead he was leaking an impossible amount of blood on a cheerful playground surrounded by a world full of rain. See, made no sense. Things went dark again.

Water. Splattering his face  
The world was dark and cold and wet  
He’d been shot. Twice.

He couldn’t see because there were droplets of water on his glasses. He was shivering. Blood running from him into the crescent void at his feet.

The grotesque monsters were shuffling around the edge of the park, as if searching for something. If they found him, they would eat him alive, but it was hard for him to move, _if? You mean when_. But he didn’t want to die, he wanted to go after Seb and make sure he was ok. He wanted to know what the hell was going on. So he very carefully sat up, lips crushed together in a thin, sharp line to keep himself from screaming as the muscles in his chest and side constrict and stretch around the bullet holes. The world spun and darkened further, but he clawed at the part of him that was telling him to _lie back down, sleep, wait, let it all go_ , and tore it out.

Instead he looked around the small playground, searching for a place to hide, knowing there wasn’t one. With agonizing slowness, left hand pressed to his chest, he reached for the gun that had slipped out of his hand, but his glove was so slick with blood he had to teeth it off before picking up the weapon. His hands were shaking badly, and the water on his glasses was annoyingly blurring his vision, so he doubted he could fire at anything effectively, but he felt somewhat better with at least that uncertain form of defense.

Then all of the monsters meandering around the edge of the park stopped, turning towards him as if they all noticed the park at once. They charged. Joseph didn’t get a shot off before everything went black.

Black  
Beep. Beep. Beep  
Screaming  
His screaming  
White

Joseph surged into a sitting position, and then fell back against the bed he’d been screaming in. A bed he didn’t recognize, in a room that he didn’t recognize; with the exception of one fixture. Kidman.

He jerked again, but this time she was ready and pushed him back down into the bed. “Joseph, relax, I’m not here to hurt you.”

He blinked owlishly at her, rubbing his eyes to scrub away some of his blurry vision, unsuccessfully. “Where is here?”

“Outside of STEM,” Kidman responded with a finality that was to be believed.

Joseph looked down. He was in what looked like a hospital gown. He tried a third time to sit up, this time much more slowly, and Kidman allowed it. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as he thought it should. Julie held out her hand, and he carefully took his glasses from her, putting them on. The foreignness and confusion came into sharper focus.

“You were never actually shot, Joseph. We were trapped in STEM with Ruben Victoriano.” Kidman explained, her expression and tone neutral. She was wearing a clean, white, button-down shirt and jeans, perched in a chair by his bed.

What she said sounded like gibberish. So he sorted through the words, analyzing them, matching them up to what he knew and the impossible things he’s just been through. Lined up everything along those two bullet holes that were no longer in his body. No, he’d left those in whatever STEM was. A shared, very bad dream controlled by this Ruben person? The thoughts sounded crazy, but he’d already concerned himself with crazy. “Ok,” he responded, voice slow, “then why am I here?”

She glanced away, “Because you didn’t die,” she looked back again, her expression as soft as he’d ever seen it, “because you somehow managed to hang on long enough that you only went into cardiac arrest _after_ I pulled out. The people I work for saved you.”

Joseph tried to absorb the information. He could have died from two gunshot wounds, but instead he somehow waited out whatever had been happening instead. “Thank y- Sebastian! Where’s Sebastian?”

Kidman reached out a hand, pressing him back into a sitting position. “Joseph, he’s fine. Better than you, actually-”

“Then where-”

“-but he’s not here.” Kidman sighed, leaning back in her chair and crossed her ankles.

Joseph echoed her sigh, tension he didn’t know he’d been holding easing out of his body. He knew he had more important questions to ask, but his head felt fuzzy and it was hard to drag rational thought through it. “How long have I been out?”

“A couple of days.” Kidman glanced towards the door, and then took the same measured breath he saw when she was about to shoot Leslie in the back. Joseph tried to brace himself. “You can’t go back with him, Joseph. You can work for the people I work for, though.”

Joseph adjusted his glasses. “Or?” He prompted wryly, but there was a tremor in his bare hands, because he knew what the ‘or’ was, and he didn’t want to go back there.

“What do you remember from before we went to Beacon Mental Hospital?” Kidman asked, and Joseph could tell she was probing for something.

“Kidman, you know that. You were there. We were…” _Sebastian was distracted, he was hiding something_ , “…we …were…” _something big, something he didn’t want to tell him about_ , “…were…” Joseph placed the heel of his hand against his brow, pushing back against the headache that was forming there. _He had promised himself he would wait – he wouldn’t push Sebastian into a confrontation. He would wait until he was ready to tell him_. “I…”

_And then it was too late._  
 _He was gone._  
 _One day._  
 _Two days._  
 _He should have forced an answer out of him._

Joseph looked up at Kidman. “I… I don’t understand. I was looking for Sebastian; he was missing. Like Myra. How were we,” he trailed off, leaving the rest of the question to the not-actually junior detective watching him expectantly.

“That was part of STEM. It adjusted your memories, so that being at Beacon Mental Hospital made sense. You were taken on your way home a few weeks ago, just like Sebastian, just like Myra,” Kidman answered, expression impassive, but her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, no longer relaxed.

Joseph scrambled to processes everything. He was up against the wall of impossible again. He pushed against it. It felt solid. It felt like a dream. But Kidman knew details about that dream, which meant she had shared it. He reevaluated what he remembered.

Myra had disappeared. For the first day he thought maybe she had finally had enough and had left Sebastian, but by the second day Joseph knew she wasn’t cold enough to run and not tell anyone, and that Sebastian’s insistence that she was missing was likely accurate.

And then Sebastian had started acting strangely. There was a barely hidden, slow burning anger. And Joseph had decided to wait until his partner was ready to tell him what it was about. He’d already strained their relationship enough with the IA report and didn’t want to push his luck. Not that he regretted the action, it was just that he missed the easiness they’d once had.

And then it was too late, and Sebastian was missing. One day. Two days. And it was Joseph’s turn to poke and prod for a search into his disappearance. He would search every night after work. Three days. He found Myra’s notes. Four days. Something was wrong at Beacon Mental Hospital. Five days. He needed an excuse to go there.

And then he was driving to Beacon Mental Hospital with Sebastian, Kidman, and Connolly like nothing had happened. Connolly who had also disappeared. An impossible drive.

“Why?” Joseph gasped out the question, staring at Kidman, looking for the answers in the impassive contours of her face. “No – who?”

Kidman uncrossed her ankles, leaning forward a little. “That’s a long story.”


End file.
